...and the people who promote this madness are always calculatingly sane, and build reputations and
careers on the madness, while the people who are mad hate it, and destroy themselves, because they
know they are mad.

-------------------------------------------------

Walking
long streets of house rows

deep
and clear autumn sunlight between cloud masses

all
the fair faces in the rooms and their abandoned destinations

with no hope of repair

betrayed
workers, paid up and forgotten,

their
language vilified, the plain speech we offer the world in

all
honesty described as “a source of evil” by

priest academics chanting etymological
curses

while
the world bears its own evidence on rays of sunlight

all along the rows
of dancers.

Indeed
we know we are nothing, our language is lies

my sighs, my broken words, the sink of my
passion

into
inarticulacy, the everyday which is where we live

in
which we are trapped

Gentle shepherd, rain on the window

It is an honour.

-------------------------------------------------

So
the final descent into madness and death

is down a Pennine hillside,
leaping small streams hung

with elder and hawthorn chest
pain image pain stumbling

over tufted meadows down cinder
tracks, vetch,

ragged robin, cow-parsley,
dandelion, speeding

between hedgerows into the edges
of the town the

garden fences the meeting places
the towers, then

to slow and stagger panting and
fall silently

across the threshold of the
public library in all the gladness and relief